What a better way to start the new year than playing a round of augmented golf? That’s exactly what the students at Rochester Institute of Technology thought when they came up with this game that doesn’t require an entire fairway.

As for this week’s video, we have Sky Canvas, an iPhone application with a brilliant concept behind it, from Shiodome Innovation Studio, Japan. A part of their PaPaCo Design Project, Shiodome tried to create an application that can be played together by a father and his son. With Sky Canvas, the two can form clouds in the shape of animals by tapping and blowing air to the microphone. Unfortunately, the app is not available outside of Japan, so I can’t really test it, but as you surely have understood by now, I dig the concept:

Ever wondered who’s the most influential twitter user among the AR crowd? According to peerindex.net it’s none other than Tonchidot’s Takahito Iguchi, though you are more than welcome to follow me

Today’s video is of a project named “SMSlingshot” by the guys at VR/Urban (also check the link for its predecessor, the Spreadgun). As you can guess by its name, it’s a slingshot that throws short text messages at walls (aided by a powerful projector). The results are quite beautiful:

This linkfest has nothing to do with Justin Bieber, and everything to do with augmented reality news bites from the last week. I’m just checking if the mere inclusion of Mr. Bieber in the title will generate more hits.

Samsung’s Bada mobile OS seems to be the hip place for AR games development. This time it’s our pals at int13 with their release of ARDefender game.

Metaio is holding a one day long conference called insideAR. I usually don’t promote such events, but they got me when they bundled it with Oktoberfest. Augmented reality and Beer, a match made in heaven?

This week’s video is a promotion video for Sekai Camera. Tonchidot, the company behind this veteran AR browser recently got a $5M from Japan’s telecom giant KDDI (though some claim that KDDI actually bought Tonchidot). And if that’s not enough, Tonchidot announced the creation of social AR game. The future looks bright for those guys:

Next week, February 15-18th, will be the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. There will be a variety of AR related events during the MWC.

AR Showcase

Christine Perey has organized an AR Showcase on Wednesday, February 17th from 5:00-7:00, so AR companies can demonstrate their services and products to customers. Designers will also have a chance to compare and contrast their products versus the competition. The following companies have confirmed their attendance:

Mobile Premier Award in Innovation
Monday, 15.2., 2010 15:00 to 20:00
Petit Palau of Palau de la Musica
Mobilizy is with Wikitude one of the 20 finalists of the “Mobile Premier Award in Innovation”.http://www.mobilepremierawards.com/
Martin Lechner, CTO Mobilizy, will present.

AR Summit

Wednesday, 17.2. 13:00 to 19:00
Location: to be announced.
Mobilizy CTO Martin Lechner presents a position paper “ARML an Augmented Reality Standard”. ARML is currently being reviewed by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). At 17:00 there will be a Wikitude Showcase presentation.

We won’t be able to attend – so if you’re there – keep us updated about your experience.

This is the last linkfest for this year. Though there were many more Christmas spectacles this week, I’m going to keep this linkfest holiday-spirit free (broke my nose, not feeling very festive).

Robert Rice on 2010, the first year in the decade of ubiquity – “The point though, is that all of these things calling themselves augmented reality now are just the start. Everyone is getting their feet wet, experimenting, exploring, and beginning to innovate. We can argue about what is or isn’t augmented reality, but it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the continual push for advancing the technology, the industry, and getting people to start using it“.

On the same theme, Edo Segal writes for Techcrunch about the dawn of ambient streams – “Increasingly, we will be sensing the world with this sixth sense and that will change the way we collectively experience the world. Going back to the point made earlier, the watershed event is when we will be experiencing this “ambient sense” without being in a retrieval mode (i.e. not when we go to the computer or our mobile device“

Point your sneakers to your webcam in order to feel silly. Which should be on Mashable’s 10 awesome uses of AR in marketing list (what, only one car campaign? seriously, where’s that GE ad that started the fad?)

This week’s video is of a projected AR system coming to us from the University of Magdeburg, Germany. Though we have seen quite a few systems like that over the past years (even one coming out from Microsoft), I don’t think we have seen any as slick as that. You can read how it works (magic! infra-red markers) at New Scientist (via Augmented Engineering).

This week’s video is of Ogmento’s Brian Selzer evangelistic talk at the Humanity+ conference “Reinventing Reality with AR” . Though most of his examples should be familiar to this blog’s patrons, he is a really good talker, and I’ve enjoyed the whole 15 minutes of his presentation (via GigantiCo):

[Games Alfresco readers, go to Gigantico to see the clip if it doesn’t work for you]